Search - Lorenzo Allegri, Domenico Belli, Giovanni Battista Buonamente :: Domenico Belli: Il nuovo stile

Songs of Love and Death from Florence

Leslie Richford | Selsingen, Lower Saxony | 06/10/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Domenico Belli, Il nuovo stile. Guillemette Laurens, mezzo-soprano; Le Poeme Harmonique, directed by Vincent Dumestre. Recorded in Paris in March, 1999. Alpha 002. Total time: 65'40".

Le Poeme Harmonique: Sophie Watillon, soprano viol; Friederike Heumann, lirone and soprano viol; Kaori Uemura, bass viol; Francoise Enock, violone; Silvia Abramowicz and Anne-Marie Lasla, tenor viol and bass viol; Nanja Breedijk, triple harp; Joel Grare, percussion; Massimo Moscardo, tiorbino and theorbo; Vincent Dumestre, theorbo and baroque guitar.





Following on from his successful debut (with songs and instrumental pieces by Bellerofonte Castaldi from Modena - Alpha 001/ASIN: B0000CF2XP), Vincent Dumestre and his Poeme Harmonique produced, in March 1999, this further album of discovery devoted, primarily, to Domenico Belli, a native of Florence, who apparently never left his home town and spent the last years of his life in the service of the Medici prince there. As a contemporary of Claudio Monteverdi (Belli died in 1627, his date of birth is unknown), Belli experienced the birth of monodic song and of opera, and his own works, as far as they have survived, are in this vein: Guillemette Laurens here sings ten of his songs, all of them dealing with the typical themes of the day, namely, love and death - and doing so with the typical Italian combination of passion and ornament. The songs are accompanied either by viols or by an ensemble including theorbo, tiorbino, guitar, lirone and percussion and offer a sensuous glance into life at a Northern Italian court around 1620. The closest parallel to this music that I know of would be the songs of Giulio Caccini. As the ten Belli songs would have made for a very short CD, they are here complemented by some excellently played and recorded works by Buonamente, whose Aria di Fiorenza is a series of variations on the famous Ballo del Gran Ducca, and by Lorenzo Allegri (Sinfonia, Ballo delle Ninfe, Ballo dello Serena). The engineering is on a par with the magnificent performance, and the presentation digipack with its attempt at combining music with art is praiseworthy in the extreme. The enclosed notes, originally in French, have been perfectly rendered into English by Mary Pardoe.



It appears that Amazon has this disc twice in its catalogue - this is exactly the same as ASIN: B0000CF2XQ."